Summary Week 5

Second Life is both a social psychological playground where participants enjoy individualistic fantasies and a virtual community where they collaborate on collective projects. When people define the virtual as real, it is real in its consequences. Accordingly, social virtual spaces such as Second Life offer sociologists unique opportunities for research, education, intervention, and hence the development of a virtual imagination.

Second Life fits the definition of a “social virtual world.” Such worlds have six characteristics.

1. Shared Space: the world allows many users to participate at once.

2. Graphical User Interface: the world depicts space visually, ranging in style

from 2D “cartoon” imagery to more immersive 3D environments.

3. Immediacy: interaction takes place in real time.

4. Interactivity: the world allows users to alter, develop, build, or submit customized content.

5. Persistence:the world’s existence continues regardless of whether individual users are logged in.

7. Socialization/Community: the world allows and encourages the formation

of in-world social groups like guilds, clubs, cliques, housemates, neighborhoods, and so forth.

When residents construct their Second Life self, they can spend agonizing days and many Lindens sculpting an avatar/self they are satisfied with, regardless of whether it “looks like” their actual physical self. In Second Life, therefore, our digital-physical appearance is no longer determined by genetic baggage or shaped by habit, age, and other natural biological processes.

Social virtual worlds provide a free “potential space” where real individuals avatars can and do attempt to create an alternative reality. The disembodied self of e-mails, blogs, Web sites and chat rooms is reembodied as an avatar, who visually interacts with others, is influenced by them, and self-reflects from their perspectives. With their visual and acoustic capacities, promotion of creativity, and emphasis on spontaneous interactivity, social virtual worlds such as Second Life heighten the realism of our participation and the intensity of the emotions we experience there. As a result, the constantly evolving avatar influences the “real” self, who now also orients toward virtual, yet all-too-real others.

Gottschalk, S. (2010). The Presentation of Avatars in Second Life: Self and Interaction in Social Virtual Spaces. Symbolic Interaction, 33(4), 501-525. doi: 10.1525/si.2010.33.4.501